“People telling me ‘you’re disgusting,’ ‘give up,’ ‘your parents could never love you looking the way you do,’ ‘no one could ever love you looking the way you do,’ so I get a lot of that,” she said.

While Tonjes now says the word "fat" is an accurate descriptor, she protests the negative associations people have with the word.

“Call me lazy, call me unmotivated, call me ugly, call me sloppy, call me unhygienic, call me all these other things that people associate with the word fat. That is not true. You never know where somebody is in their journey with their weight,” Tonjes says in the video.

Such associations are widespread, Arya M. Sharma, MD/PhD, FRCPC of the Canadian Obesity Network noted.